Interview
by When Rabbits Attack
Summary: There were two types of people in the world you didn't want to piss off. Reporters were the second one.


**Spoilers:** 2.15 "The Maltese Falcon Job"  
**Credits:** Thank you **rinkle** and **goodisrelative** for the beta. And anyone else who might have gotten involved.  
**Author's Notes:** This is the third one I wrote set in the time period between the end of Season 2 and the events that would lead into Season 3.

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Interview

"Hullo, Jimmy."

Sterling straightened up, pulling his untouched cup of unspeakably bad tea closer towards him in a gesture that to an outsider might simply seem polite, the act of clearing space for a companion. Greetings are a funny thing. Take for example... Nate. Nate rarely bothers with 'hello' and when he does it's usually to mock Sterling's own preferred opener. Not only that, but it's 'Sterling' always 'Sterling' with a distinct distaste, as though there's a tarnish on it. A stranger would use 'Mister' and a polite one would preface with 'Excuse me'. But this... even if the voice were disguised with every trick known to man, beast, and Alec Hardison, Sterling would know who it was. Few people dared call him that; fewer still ever did it more than once. "I thought the FBI was guarding this hospital."

"Funny thing, that." She sat down opposite him not even bothering with the camouflage of a cup of her own. "They had the OR wing pretty much stitched up for a while," there was no way the pun was anything but deliberate, not with this person, "but now they've moved upstairs. They couldn't block the doors or the cafeteria." She paused, leaning a little closer as though about to divulge a big secret. "At any rate, they're not here to protect you."

He looked around him. No one else seemed to be paying attention to them, and more importantly no one seemed to _not_ be paying attention. "And what does Reuters want with small-town America corruption?" He eyed the liquid in his cup, deliberately not looking at her. It really was horrible stuff to contemplate.

"News is news," she shrugged. "And Interpol..."

Now he did look at her, straight on. He said nothing. It was a full thirty seconds before she smirked.

"The FBI will be giving a press-conference. I'm sure it will be appropriately misinformative." He tapped his finger on the rim of his mug. It took a moment for him to recognise the rhythm his subconscious had chosen. _Welcome Home (Sanitarium)_. Not surprising, considering.

"And how will they ever manage that without your help?" She rested her elbows on the table and interlocked her fingers to create a cradle for her chin. "King of all..."

"...bollocks." He was too tired for games. Besides, it was an accurate summation of the whole damn thing. Why did Nate have to be such a goddamned hero? Why didn't he see it coming? Sterling tried to ignore the twisting in the pit of his stomach and the sour-acid taste at the back of his throat. He should have been better prepared than...

"So, what's the matter? The other kids won't let you play with them?"

Eliot Spencer could have taken lessons from the glare Sterling delivered. Unfortunately, she probably had every idea how close to the mark that was. "What do you want, Lar?"

"To know what you want." She cut him off with a shake of her head before he could even begin to reply. "Not what the FBI wants, or Interpol wants – oh, I'm sure Reuters could find something to do with that, but I can get that anywhere – but what does Jimmy Sterling want?"

_Not to be called 'Jimmy_', he almost said, but it wouldn't do any good. She'd either read it as a stall tactic and get pissed off, or just plain get pissed off. There were two types of people in the world you didn't want to piss off. Reporters were the second one.

"Who is this guy you're guarding?" She reached out and took his cup away, setting it towards the edge of the table. "And that's getting annoying."

"I'm afraid I can't..."

"Now that's bollocks." She pointed a finger at him, accusingly. "I know you rarely have a high opinion of peoples' intelligence, but how fucking stupid do you really think I am?"

That was the problem. She wasn't. She would have made one hell of a fraud investigator if she hadn't thought of insurance as one step above loan-sharking. He told her once what he thought news-reporting was one step above. The result was a blow-out fracture and surgery just to be able to see straight again. Lara Rankin was not someone a smart man crossed twice. Sterling had done it too many times to keep track. Like she said, he was more than merely 'smart'. "Do you really want an answer to that question?"

"Do you really want a bed next to your friend's?" Her eyes narrowed as she studied his expression. "That's it. It is personal, isn't it?"

He kept his face non-committal. If you could ask Nate, he'd tell you it couldn't be personal, because they'd never been friends. There seemed little chance of it now and it shortened the list of people Sterling could trust, considerably. Despite their antagonism, he'd never picked Nate to be one to put a knife in his back. He should have known better. Nate is an addict, pure and simple. Like so many, he'd finally accepted his problem not as a problem but a choice. Sterling had been half-prepared to hear 'I can give it up whenever I want', even as the man sat bleeding on the docks.

"Wow. That is something, for you. Which means either he's got something on you or..." She started laughing. "You actually _respect_ him, don't you?

Trust Lara to phrase it like that. Had she said 'like', he'd have been able to deny it, at least half-plausibly. Like was not a word he applied very often. But he had respected Nate. Even now, there was some. Most people were boring and predictable. Outsmarting them wasn't hard. It wasn't even mildly challenging. Nate, though... Nate had a way of making things interesting. When they'd worked together, it had been educational. Nobody could figure out a scam the way Nate could.

"I don't think there's more than five people in the world you could honestly say that about," Lara said. "So, what's so special?"

Deprived of his cup, he began tapping on the table. It was bolted to the floor, so she couldn't take that away. She, of all people, should know he didn't like discussing anything personal. He had no sympathy for people who couldn't respect that. "He's a witness. Our sole witness. I have an interest in seeing he stays alive."

She pretended to take notes, sans paper or any kind of pen. Sterling knew what she meant. He was stalling and she wanted him to know she knew it. "And if I do research, what am I going to find? Do you know how easy it'll be for me to get a name? You know what I can do with a name."

"Nate Ford." She was right, getting the name is simple for a reporter. Every other one on the story already had it, if they had the slightest interest in trying. "And you'll find he was," he put a strong stress on the last word, "an employee of IYS."

"Your old firm," she said. "What a cozy little world." She cocked her head. "Taller than you," as if that would be hard, "dark hair, quite the masonry artist, if I recall."

He snorted. Yes, Nate could stonewall. Sterling hadn't been kidding when he said that criminality had made the man a better liar. Before then his sole trick had been to refuse to reveal anything at all. Now he thought he could play the Eastern European mob and the FBI all at the same time. He was lucky to be alive.

"You did like him." Lara nodded even as she reached out and flicked her nail hard into the knuckle of his drumming finger. "You trusted him not to screw things up. I remember that."

He raised his eyebrows as if to ask what he'd been drinking when he gave that up.

"Years ago. Some heist or another... you ended up both of you in front of the scrum. You weren't paying that much attention, like you knew you didn't have to jump in and fix something he was liable to screw up." She smiled, just slightly. "Do you even know you do that? Keep an eye on people you don't trust?"

He shrugged. Didn't everybody?

"But him... him you trusted. And you don't normally trust clever people."

He pretended to study the queue of people at the cash-register, as though each one might somehow be dangerous. He didn't have a problem with clever people, his problem was people who _thought_ they were clever. People like Blackpoole, who thought that being sneaky was the same as being smart. It hadn't been a sacrifice to let the man fall, even if Nate did get some of the motivation wrong. There'd been little Sterling could gain from it professionally, but personally it had been sweet watching the mannerless bastard get his just deserts. If there was a top thing Sterling couldn't stand, it was someone who treated people as things. He might be a misanthrope, but people were still people. Manipulating them was one thing. If someone was too stupid to figure out what was going on around them, that was their problem. You still acknowledged them as something other than tools or decorations to be pulled out when you needed them.

"I know you want to tell somebody."

No, he didn't. "Reporters aren't 'somebody'."

"You're getting smarter," she shot back. "At least now you're saving that for when you're already in a hospital, to save you the trip.

"Assault on an officer of the law. You're forgetting, I'm not in insurance anymore. You lose the sympathy vote."

She grinned. "Not according to the boys from the FBI. According to them, you're a right, royal bastard. They'd likely be fighting over who got to buy me the first drink."

He shook his head. It'd probably be Nevins. Ask her and she'd probably spend hours describing all the ways she felt he'd stepped on her dainty little toes. He had no sympathy for her, either. He found her ability to overlook gunrunning in exchange for busting petty corruption absolutely disgusting. It kept her a spot on his 'to be dealt with' list, no question.

"Of course, they probably thought that little tidbit was 'news'. I didn't tell them that you were probably just being polite."

He didn't rise to that bait. The trouble with Lara wasn't that she'd pull the journalist trick of taking his remarks out of context, but rather that she'd put them into context. Choosing his words carefully was possibly more dangerous than not choosing them at all.

"So, let's see here. We've got the former insurance investigator turned bad, captured by his upright colleague, now working in international law enforcement along with – and this is key – an international arms dealer working to exploit a major weakness in America's security..."

He waited.

"... which I _can't_ send to my editors because I'm fucking lousy at writing fiction."

He shrugged. "It's all true."

"So, why aren't you out there, making sure everything spins just right? Why isn't _your_ face the one on camera, explaining how the brilliance and hard work of Interpol and the FBI has struck a blow for justice?"

He reached out and patted her hand. "There you go. You've got the scoop. Run with it."

"Damnit, Jimmy, fuck you." For a moment he thought she'd pick up the tea and douse him with it. "You think if I wanted to spoil this masquerade of yours, I couldn't? You think I couldn't tell the world that Super-detective James Sterling is really just Jimmy, that kid that everybody knew and nobody liked? The bully who couldn't even get followers, let alone friends..."

"Then what does that make you?" As soon as he said it, he knew it was a mistake, but she was one of the few people in the world who could do that to him. Nate was another one. He was losing all the people who could hurt him, today.

"Stupid, obviously." She got up and took the cup of tea with her, chucking it in a garbage can on her way out the cafeteria doors. He sat there for a while, knowing that the human thing to do would be to chase after her and apologise. The intelligent thing would be to make sure she didn't destroy him. He didn't move. It made a kind of sense, really. Everything had gone to hell, why shouldn't everything else? Lara was wrong, he couldn't spin this because he'd lost control from the second he let the FBI handle any bit of this. Nevins had things so fucked up here and was so fucking paranoid that he'd destroy it that there'd been no way to achieve a truly desirable outcome.

Thank God, in some ways, _for_ Nate. At least he'd been able to recognise the cues he was being fed. At one time he would even have recognised he was being fed them. _"... all sitting in a secure FBI locker, awaiting my next irrevocable phone call."_ In fact, time was Nate would have berated Sterling for being so blatant. If he'd just picked it up... Nevins and her crew would have been complete fools for arresting such innocent helpful citizens and having no proof of their crimes. They still looked like minor fools for letting said evidence be destroyed but now... cock-up was an understatement. At least with Nate in charge he had the comfort of knowing that four major criminals and one brilliant fool were at least all in one place, and somewhat neutralised, to be dealt with later. Now... if they were smart, they'd scatter and disappear. Then he'd never find them.

Sterling closed his eyes. His head hurt. It was one thing if he'd truly been outmanoeuvred; it was being done in by stupidity that hurt most. Lara was right – the only way to play this was as brilliant inter-agency action, capturing not one but two notorious criminals. Convince Nevins that it wasn't all bad losing a million little cases in favour of that one big one that would send her places. Sterling thought for a moment. It could work. Give her the spotlight and more people would be able to see her next big screwup – and she would screw up, it was in her nature – and no one could say she hadn't done it to herself.

He nodded, slightly and stood up. It could work, if luck was on his side and Lara didn't take the last five minutes personally. He hoped not. She should know better than that by now. She ought to know better than anyone than to expect a positive result from pushing him. Everybody was behaving strangely, today. Normally Lara was like Nate and smart enough only to push him in the direction she didn't want him to go. Normally _he_ knew better than to let his true frustration show.

"And this, too, shall pass." It was his fallback to when things got out of control, a reminder that it was only a temporary aberration. There was no need to panic – panic only ensured that more things would go wrong. _If the plan fails, pick another plan_, Nate used to say, and it was good advice, even if the advisor could no longer be trusted. He picked up his pace as he headed through the cafeteria doors, already beginning to work out the finer details. Nevins and her crew weren't going to stand a chance. Later, he'd turn his attention to the problem of Nate and his. In the meantime, he had a press-conference to crash.


End file.
